“We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.“

“...And even though white and black people smoke at basically the same rate, black people are four times more likely to be arrested for marijuana. The racist anti-drug laws that Nixon and Anslinger created still punish minorities to this day. “

“Wrong again! We’ve locked up a whole bunch of non-violent drug criminals, while the kingpins keep making a ton of money. The US illicit drug market is worth an estimated $109 billion a year. The Sinaloa drug cartel has as many as 150,000 employees — that’s more than Apple!”

“And so they did. In the 90s, drug maker Purdue started marketing Oxycontin like crazy with weird swag like stuffed toys, golf balls, and even a CD of swing music. And soon Oxycontin’s popularity surged.”